nearly changed my old layout, and then decided not to.
---
What really fucked me up was that after it happened, the blinkers on the construction barricades still flashed. The streets were a wasteland, but the barricades still lit regularly to warn us of potholes and rifts that had been our greatest concern, at least before.
It was a zombie night. The one where it's just after two in the morning and the streets are eerie with the street lamps that would usually shine protectively over us. A vague air of menace, like something was poised to come shambling out of the darkness at us--a slow sure fate. Before we left Cooper's house, Jo was looking at the sky like it held the promise of something. When the rest of us gobbed out of his front door, hushed grins on our faces still throwing lines from the movie out like a promise of camaraderie, we saw that the sky was pregnant with thunder. The lightning was coming in blue flashes, ethereal against the orange sunrise of Chicago, but we were young and full of laughter, and only Jo watched.
"It's strange like that," she said in the half-dark, catching up to us at the van, "without the thunder." We snuck furtive glances at at the sky and found nothing, murmured agreement, clambered inside. "Don't you think?"
"It'll rain tomorrow, maybe. Maybe it won't be so humid." I pulled half-heartedly at the front of my shirt to let the clammy air in, and shuddered. Somewhere between the bright red of Cooper's door and the van my good mood had melted off of me; soluble, perhaps, with the dead wet heat that had lain over the suburbs for days. It stole into your nostrils and pounded on the inside of your skull when you sat up too fast, deposited lead in your limbs, and made even the dogs too lazy to enjoy the summer time. How could they--when their tails wagged they looked like weightlifters, straining. The headlines had been saying it was the worst heat wave to hit the city in years, had said there were already casualties to the weight of the heat and water in the air--how it weighed them down and sweated them dry. That we should drink water to stay hydrated but none of us could stand to, not when we felt like drowning in every breath. Pray for rain.
"Maybe," Jo said, "but it doesn't look like rain."
"There's a storm at least, right?" I countered, pressing my cheek to the thick glass of the back windows as the sky rolled overhead.
"No thunder though," she said, almost sullenly, leaning back into the seat beside me. It was really bothering her.
"That happens all the time with summer storms, doesn't it?" I aimed my query at the front seat, not really caring, but hoping consensus from the boys would get her to stop thinking about it. Lewis, in typical silence, shrugged his shoulders, which no-one could see. Sam tossed a thoughtless affirmative, and started enumerating what would happen if Lewis crashed the van due to fatigue. Jo pursed her lips, obviously not mollified. Meanwhile, Sam had reached over to gleefully tickle Lewis with his long engineer's fingers under the pretext of keeping him alert. Lewis, unamused, made to swerve the car back and forth, trying to scare Sam off his mission, but only alarming Jo and me. Jo, having had enough of Sam's early morning antics, booted the back of his chair. The world exploded into light, and the screech of our tires against the pavement was lost in Jo's thunder.
It came in waves, roaring from everywhere, and simultaneous with the hot blue light that seared through the windshield and devoured the pockets of darkness in the van, burning our shadows bare and blasting the dark of the van's metal into our eyes. I think I screamed, but I couldn't tell, because the noise ate everything. Invasive and pounding, it tore our senses along with it to the pinnacle of their sensing and burst them there, exquisite hearing and the deafness, deafness or noise, one had gone so far as to become the other and there was either nothing or everything and I jerked frantically as if held down for the violation and splintering of my skull, the sundering of the thin skin over it and the air over that, every gunshot ever fired on this Earth directed at my ears and fired in unison but forever and they would tell us later it rose and fell but to me it was a silent and terrible scream or the voice of God and the light if we let in it would cleanse our soul with fire.
It was an hour before I could see the color grey again.
It was two before I could see shades, and three before I could see the rifts and seismic chunks of the intersection just ahead of us. We would hear only the ring for days.
---
*blurbles*
...bed...
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